A DEBT.
" The following is a table of the permanent indebtedness of Great Britain, France, Russia, Austria, and the United States, of the burden of the interest of the debt of each Government, of the burden of the debts per capita on the population of each, and of the ratio of the interest to the annual production of the five countries respect ively :— " Our ability to pay our war debt has been demonstrated by an exhibit of the re sources of the nation. The best statists connected with the financial department of the Government have shown that the customs revenues of the United States, the excise and internal taxes, our mineral regions scarcely yet opened, our two millions of acres of petroleum wealth, our unsold public lands, and the certain growth of the country in population and the equally certain increase of its manufactures, will be sufficient to discharge this debt to the last dollar within twenty-five years. And this debt will be discharged, if the people so ordain. Its payment, or its retention unpaid, is a matter for the people to decide. It is their debt to discharge, if it be a burden. It is their debt to perpetuate, if it be a good.
" In studying these permanent debts, and discussing the policy of maintaining them, or discharging them by payment, the mind should free itself from the tyranny of words. Great Britain is in debt to Great Britain. Great Britain does, indeed, owe Great Britain four thousand millions of dollars. The burden of the debt crushes the mind in contemplation of it. But its vastness is not the measure of the obligation ; for there is no engage ment on the part of the debtor kingdom to pay the principal of the debt, and little if any expectation, and less desire, on the part of its creditor subjects that it shall be paid. The principal of the debt, being thus removed from our educated idea of a legal burden, and of the necessity to discharge a pecuniary obligation, ceases to represent the burden.
" The interest of the debt only becomes the measure of its burden. Great Britain does owe to Great Britain, confessedly, $4,000,000,000. But practically, and by consent and harmonious arrangement, Great Britain owes to Great Britain only $127,000,000 a year. And that is a very small debt for the proprietors and workmen of the workshop of the world' to owe to each other. Its distributive burden is but $129.33 a head, which is not assessed on pay-day per capita, but is justly apportioned, the larger share upon the proprietors of the workshop, and the smaller and gmallest upon the artisans and laborers. This, practically and financially, is a fair statement of the nature and burden
of the much-talked-of British debt.
" Such, too, should be the regard of our debt. The United States will owe, mostly to the people of the United States, $165,000,000 a year. The burden, nominally $86.72 upon every citizen, and less than that of the British debt, unlike that of Great Britain, will every year rapidly diminish by the rapid increase of our population by immi gration and natural growth, and by the rapid augmentation of our wealth. For among the other blessings of our war will probably be the transfer of the workshop of the world from England to America.
" The Englishman who has £20,000 in three per cent. consols at his bankers, and only ten guineas in his pocket, and who gives assent to a proposal made to him to go mine for coal on Vancouver's Island, has got £20,000 in cash to go into the operation. He knows that positively. The world knows it. British consols are cash capital. This cannot be controverted. And the $4,000,000,000 of British debt is national cash capital to the industry and commerce of Great Britain. For half a century this seemingly and nominally huge and burdensome debt has served to vitalize the manufacturing and trading genius of the English people, and, as money, has enabled the British to do for that long time the marine carrying for the world, and to make for the world cloth, iron, steel, tin, and hardware. This enormous mass of capital, infused into the business of England at the close of her twenty-two years' war with the French Republic and Empire, almost always of par with gold, convertible daily and hourly into gold, accepted as gold in all transactions, was the source of that prodigious development of mechanical industry and accumulation of wealth which so suddenly bore upward the English after the battle of Waterloo to the command of the trade and finances of the globe." But England does not import over double her exports. Slie does not buy twice as much as she sells, and pay the difference in bonds at from five to six per cent. interest. Nor does she owe $1,000,000,000 to other nations. Not one cent of her bonds goes out of the hands of her citizens, if she can prevent it by legislation ; and this has been so effectually done that she is a lender of money, instead of a borrower.